Hypoxia Adaptation and Performance at Altitude

• My project is being carried out in collaboration with University College London (UCL), who headed the Caudwell Xtreme Everest Expedition (CXE) in 2007.
• During CXE 2007 over 200 volunteers climbed upto Everest Base Camp at 5300m, carrying out various exercise performance tests on the way up.
• The Feelisch group is working in collaboration with the UCL team to understand how individuals adapt to hypoxia, and why some individuals seem to adapt better than others.

What is Hypoxia?

• A lack of oxygen in the cells/ tissues.
• It can be caused by a decrease in oxygen in inspired air (for example due to altitude) or by an inability to use the oxygen available.

Critical Illness

• Many critically ill patients suffer from hypoxia, which can be a result of their illness or contribute towards it.
• The main treatment of hypoxia in critically ill patients is additional oxygen, however, this can sometime have no affect or cause more problems.
• We want to understand the molecular adaptation to hypoxia, and how this varies on an individual level, so that we can adapt new ways of treating critically ill patients, where supplementary oxygen is not suitable.
  

How can this research help?

• If we can understand how the population as a whole adapts to hypoxia, this can help us to understand when things go wrong.
• When we look on an individual level we can see the inter-individual differences that determine why some individuals adapt well and other do not.
• This can allow us to see why a specific individual is not adapting well, with the possibility of adapting treatments that can 'boost' an individual's natural response to hypoxia
  

What am I currently doing?

• We have collected biochemical data from plasma samples taken during CXE 2007 and have access to physiological data collected during CXE 2007.
• I am currently performing various statistical analyses on the data to look for any 'patterns' within the dataset.
• As my background is in biological sciences, I am currently spending time learning how to use various statistical techniques and how to programme in matlab.
• I have also recently helped with Sea Level testing for the Xtreme Alps expedition.